The World War II ShadowWorld War II has been over for almost 70 years, but it still casts a shadow over literature and the movies. It symbolizes the ultimate war between good and evil. It was a war where you could identify the heroes and the villains. And those personalities still fascinate us. Hitler remains one of the most evil and intriguing characters to walk across the stage. Was there any good in him? From Charlie Chaplin on, actors have tried to find some humanity in him. Most have not found any. There a brief moments when he appears normal, but the moments are very few and fleeting. His terrible deeds outnumber and overshadow any trace of humanity. Where did his hatred come from and why was it so intense? He failed as an art student. Many people do not succeed. What made Hitler the fanatic that he was? These are the type of questions that continue to fascinate. For if Hitler is the face of evil, then the men, women, and children who opposed him are the many heroes in the saga of World War II. There are the every day Germans who quietly helped their neighbors. There are the families who saved Jewish people when they could, like the family that tried to save Anne Frank. There are the people like Schindler, who was a "good" German, yet worked to protect people. World War II offers us many threads. It is a tangled story of emotions, beliefs, and impulses. Stories from World War II keep surfacing. Recently a German woman revealed she had been on of Hitler's teen taste-testers. She tasted Hitler's food first. Hitler was convinced there was a conspiracy to poison him. The search for Nazis has not stopped. World War II is an era that will always intrigue and fascinate us, whether we are reading adult novels or YA ones. Here are some great novels that explore that era. Most can be found at local bookstores, Amazon.com, your local library, or Barnes and Noble. Curl up and travel back in time. Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History.(Soon to be a major movie with George Clooney!) At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloging the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised. In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture. Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis.HHhHHHhH: “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich”, or “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”. The most dangerous man in Hitler’s cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the “Butcher of Prague.” He was feared by all and loathed by most. With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible—until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service, killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History. A seemingly effortlessly blend of historical truth, personal memory, and Laurent Binet’s remarkable imagination, HHhH—an international bestseller and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman—is a work at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing, a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on the nature of writing and the debt we owe to history.Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. There are plenty of other books about World War II. Some authors to check out are: Alan Furst, Phillip Kerr, and Joseph Kanon. There are great YA novels dealing with World War II. Two excellent ones are: Farewell to Manzanar and Number the Stars. Two good novels that are great to compare and contrast and to be part of a Holocaust unit are: The Diary of Anne Frank and In Hitler's Backyard. And this doesn't even address the many movies. Next blog, the movies!